How Web Scraping Works with PHP
Web scraping involves three primary steps:
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Requesting a URL: Use GET or POST to fetch data from a specified URL.
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Receiving HTML Response: Receive the HTML returned as the server's response.
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Parsing HTML: Extract the desired text using regular expressions.
Useful PHP Functions
PHP offers several built-in functions for web scraping:
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file_get_contents: Reads a file's contents into a string.
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curl_init: Initializes a new cURL session for performing HTTP requests.
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preg_match_all: Performs a regular expression match and returns all matching substrings.
Resources for Learning PHP Web Scraping
- [Regular Expressions Tutorial](https://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.repattern.php)
- [Regex Buddy Demo](https://www.regexbuddy.com/)
- [PHP Curl Class](https://github.com/jbrooksuk/PHP-Curl-Class)
Implementation
$curl = new Curl();
$html = $curl->get("http://www.google.com");
// Parse HTML using regular expressions
This code uses the Curl class to fetch the HTML from a given URL. You can then use PHP's regular expression capabilities to extract specific data from the HTML response.
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